What is required is some philosophic system which is bold enough to include the element of so-called "superstition" and at the same time contradicts neither reason nor the aesthetic sense.
Such a system, we contend, is supplied by the philosophy of the complex vision; a philosophy which, while remaining frankly anthropomorphic and mythological, does not, in any narrow or impudent or complacent manner, slur over the bitter ironies of this cruel world, or love the clear outlines of all drastic issues in a vague, unintelligible, unaesthetic idealism.
What our philosophy insists upon is that the modern tendency to reduce everything to some single monistic "substance," which, by the blind process of "evolution," becomes all this passionate drama that we see, is a tendency utterly false and misleading. For us the universe is a much larger, freer, stranger, deeper, more complicated affair than that.
For us the universe contains possibilities of real ghastly, incredible evil, descending into spiritual depths, before which the normal mind may well shudder and turn dismayed away.
For us the universe contains possibilities of divine, magical, miraculous good, ascending into spiritual heights and associating itself with immortal super-human beings, before which the mind of the merely logical intelligence may well pause, baffled, puzzled, and obscurely indignant.
The "fulcrum" upon which the whole issue depends, the "pivot" upon which it turns, is the existence of actual living souls filling the immense spaces of nature.
If there is no "soul" in any living thing, then our whole system crumbles to pieces. If there are living "souls" in every living thing, then the universe, as revealed by the complex vision, is more real than the universe as revealed by the chief exponents of modern thought.
CHAPTER XIV.
THE IDEA OF COMMUNISM